Blog Post

Camera Obscura Demo Release

This week marks the first public release of a playable demo for Camera Obscura! The released demo contains 20 levels out of the 100 total in the full game. We have also included the full level editor, so you can make and share custom levels without limit.

We are very excited to be at this stage where we can finally begin to get solid feedback from people based on how the game actually plays. Please download it and let us know what you think, and remember to support us on Greenlight!

The process of releasing a demo was a surprisingly lengthy one. I always thought I would just compile a release build, stick a readme file in it, and send it out to the internet. As it turned out, however, there were numerous aspects of the game that had to be examined and tweaked to make sure publication went (and continues to go) smoothly. In addition to the normal, everyday tasks of polishing features and tackling bugs, I had to consider what parts of the user's saves needed to be kept for future versions of the game (like their options and achievements) and which parts would need to be thrown out later, and build in a mechanism for allowing that. I also had to build an installer to ensure the users would have all the right dependencies (runtime dependencies can suck). And, of course, we had to test the heck out of every other aspect of the game, as well. The thought of someone putting aside the game because it crashed on the menu screen is not a nice one. So there's my semi-educational post-mortem thing for publishing a demo.